Asynchronous table access - possible feature request.

[Wade Bowmer]

I've come across an interesting problem with the database I look after. And that is the read-locking is a little aggressive. For example: if I do a CREATE TABLE foo SELECT * FROM bar, then table `bar` is locked from all access until the statement finishes. Whilst this doesn't happen very often, it is onconvenient when it does. The same problem occurs when a query (e.g. a SELECT ... LIKE '%...%') takes a long time; the table(s) it's looking in are locked whilst the query is running. This is a bigger problem, only partially mitigated by using FullText indexing and some clever manipulations with temporary tables.

I've heard that some other databases have ways of "de-coupling" these sort of accesses so that during a long SELECT, other SELECTs can still run and UPDATEs are journalled so that later queries see the changes but still running ones don't. Is this on the cards for MySQL?

Wade.